Filter wheels are used in many image-capture systems. While these filter wheel systems perform well they have found limited market success due to their slow image capture rates. In essence, the weakness in prior art systems is the time required for the filter wheel to sequence/rotate between filters, even in recent attempts to make the process faster, as shown in U.S. Publication 2011/0128545 to Cox et al. for a Fast-Indexing Filter Wheel And Method Of Use.
By changing the construction of the filter wheel one can make significant improvements to the time required to change between filters on a filter wheel. Additional changes to the rotational drive mechanism allow optimization and synchronization between filter position and image-capture timing.